Catastrophic Gerber output error in Eagle v9

[Anonymous]

I've recently created a board with some MEMS microphone components. The footprints aren't great, but they seem to be good enough - or so I thought.

When viewed in Eagle v9, and indeed when rendered to Gerber in v7, my board looks like this:

Notice the MK4 component, a MEMS mic with two square pads above a larger, annular ring, and a ground plane around it.

When rendered to Gerber files, using Eagle v9.0.1, the output looks like this:

Here the two pads have been overflown by the ground plane, merging three signals (two of them are +3.3v and gnd).

As mentioned, using the same design (saved to v7 format) and the same CAM files produces a perfectly correct result using Eagle v7. By correct, I mean the Gerbers look like the preview in Eagle.

These boards were sent to production with the error, causing serious delay and cost, as well as lost credibility with our client. I always inspect the Gerbers visually before sending off, looking for problems with registration, overlap et c. But I've never seen an error like this, and frankly it's worrying that Eagle now produces production files that break all design rules - with no warning.

[Anonymous]

I can confirm the problem. Please see an other example of the problem here : https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/difference-between-brd-and-gerbers/td-p/8094137.

[Anonymous]

I've just tried with Eagle v8.7.1 and can confirm that the Gerbers are correctly generated, see attached pic.

This is with the same BRD and CAM files as used with Eagle v9.0.1, which produces invalid Gerbers.

[edwin.robledo]

Hi marsFUHFQ,

Thank you for participating on the EAGLE forum. Would you please let me know if you use the default Gerber template in EAGLE v9.0.1, or did you load use a custom one.

Best Regards,

Edwin

[Anonymous]

Hi Edwin,

thanks for getting back to me.

I've used a custom CAM which I have now passed on to your colleagues along with the design files.

I look forward to hearing what you discover.

best,

Martin

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Is someone has trying with the newest version V9.1.0 ?

Best regards

[matt.berggren · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your post. This was fixed with 9.1.0. Please let us know if you experience the same behavior however this issue with Polygon pad shapes and the legacy CAM jobs was addressed and a fix included with this release. We tested on all of the examples customers sent us and they performed perfectly, so we’re confident that the fix put in got to the root of the issue.

For what it’s worth, this was something that simply updating the CAM job to the current version solved. It’s still not great news however we’d encourage you to avoid using old, legacy CAM files (especially those from pre-v6 or v7) or unless you’ve got a specific reason for doing so. We have testing in place to catch these sorts of issues but this was a particularly slippery one and got thru.

Best regards,

Matt - Autodesk

[Anonymous]

Thanks, that sounds promising.

I didn't realise that CAM jobs had to be upgraded to the new version. Must have missed that memo.

I'm now trying v9.1.0. The icons are HUGE! In fact they're so big that I can no longer see the Process Job button on the CAM dialog, which makes this difficult (my screen is 1920 x 1080px).

I had to use the tab key and guess at the right button, but I've now managed to run the job and can confirm that my polygon problem seems resolved.

Screenshot attached: notice the difference between text size (normal) and icons (massive!)

Eagle v9.1.0 on Debian Linux

Guess I'm still on v8 then...

BTW I see that the CAM dialogue still has a couple of issues I first noticed in v8: It always resets to `template_4_layer.cam` and my files don't show up in Recent CAM Jobs, meaning I have to navigate to the right file every time. Annoying.

I've found the Icon Size setting and my CAM dialogue now looks like this with the minimum icon size of 4:

As you can see, still no Process Job button.

This is the Settings dialogue:

Something ain't right.